1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to Visible Light Communication (VLC) technology and, more particularly, to technology that transmits VLC data, to be transmitted through VLC using a light source such as a Light-Emitting Diode (LED), to the light source over a DMX-512 network.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the use of lighting apparatuses using Light-Emitting Devices (LEDs), that is, semiconductor devices capable of transferring information using visible rays, increases, service for transferring information using lighting apparatus is attracting interest. A VLC system using LED lighting requires a lighting control network that is capable of carrying VLC data from a data provider to a lighting apparatus.
DMX-512 that is used as lighting control network technology is currently used for the purpose of transferring dimming data. Basically, the DMX-512 technology can send dimming information via 512 channels at 1 byte per channel. If VLC data is assigned to DMX-512 channels using the above characteristic of DMX-512, DMX-512 can be used to transmit not only dimming data, but also communication data to be used in VLC.
In the conventional technology, communication data of 1 byte is assigned to each of the DMX-512 channels, and communication data of a maximum of 512 bytes defined in the DMX-512 standard is transferred via the DMX-512 channels. However, there is a problem in that the variety of requirements of VLC cannot be satisfied by the conventional technology having the limit of 512 bytes, because, depending on the use environment and purpose of VLC, data of 512 bytes or more frequently needs to be transmitted.
As an example of the conventional technology, Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2011-0061069 discloses an LED lighting apparatus that performs control so that DMX-512 data can be transmitted in accordance with the DMX-512 protocol.